


These Days

by galateas



Category: Cowboy Bebop (Anime)
Genre: Death, Depression, F/M, Gen, Identity Issues, Slow Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:42:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 21,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27197335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galateas/pseuds/galateas
Summary: Not with a bang, but not with a whimper either. It turned out the end didn’t come for Spike at all.He had said he wasn’t going to meet Vicious to die and that hadn’t been a total lie, but Spike had still expected to find an answer, or finality in some form. Only it hadn’t come. After everything he had gone through, it hadn’t come. He thought he had climbed all the way to the top of the staircase, but the only thing waiting for him was a false step that he’d gone tumbling through, all the way down to the bottom again, like it was a great cosmic game of snakes and ladders.***Spike, Faye, Jet and the aftermath. Or, what happens when time keeps on going despite everything.
Relationships: Spike Spiegel/Faye Valentine
Comments: 25
Kudos: 44





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this over five years ago and abandoned it. Then 2020 happened and I guess returning to writing this has been one of the only things stopping me having a complete mental break :) This fic is very much about Trauma, among other things.

***

These days I seem to think about  
How all the changes came about my ways  
And I wonder if I'd see another highway  
[...]  
These days I sit on cornerstones, and count the time in quarter tones to ten  
Please don't confront me with my failures  
I had not forgotten them

 _These Days_ , Nico

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

 _The White Album,_ Joan Didion

***

Not with a bang, but not with a whimper either. It turned out the end didn’t come for Spike at all.

He had said he wasn’t going to meet Vicious to die and that hadn’t been a total lie, but Spike had still expected to find an answer, or finality in some form. Only it hadn’t come. After everything he had gone through, it hadn’t come. He thought he had climbed all the way to the top of the staircase, but the only thing waiting for him was a false step that he’d gone tumbling through, all the way down to the bottom again, like it was a great cosmic game of snakes and ladders.

At least, it felt in his body like he had fallen a long way down, and that he had hit every single step as he went. That was the only thing that held any kind of shape. The pain, reminding him that he did indeed have a body. It turned out that being shot and and stabbed fucking _hurt_. It was only the morphine, which he was allowed to self-administer at intervals, that kept it remotely bearable. But the trouble with the morphine was that it didn’t help the whole am-I-dead-or-alive thing either. He felt trapped in a constant dream state, unsure if the doctors bending over him were real, unsure if Jet was real. He decided after some time that Jet probably had to be, because he appeared to talk to him so often and Spike didn’t like to think his own subconscious mind would choose to manifest him to a degree that intense, even if they were old friends.

There was also Faye, appearing scarcely at first, then with enough regularity for him to be sure she was very much there too - although she did not contribute much by way of conversation, not even to call him a lunkhead. It became clear that in her typical fashion, Faye would not be letting anything on. He did briefly wonder why she was refusing to bring up what had passed between them: was she too embarrassed, or was it for his sake? Either way, he didn’t really care. Small relief to him.

As soon as Spike was alert enough then, it inevitably fell to Jet to fill him in, about how he had gone after him - not to stop him, Jet was clear, but just to see. He knew from a Bob tip-off that the typically slow-moving ISSP were still deployed investigating the bodies outside Annie’s, giving him time to pick Spike up, not knowing if he was dead or alive but discovering at least there’d be no other living witnesses to pin him to the scene. He’d taken Spike to the street outside the hospital and called them out under the guise of being some plain-clothes cop who’d run into an unrelated drugs dispute right there and then on the corner. A feeble cover story, but it tided them over to the operating table at least.

Besides, Bob had informed him that word in the force was that Spike's involvement was suspected but they had no real grounds or inclination to pursue it. After all, he’d just sort of done their job for them and now they had a massive clean up to focus on so what was bringing an arrest in the mix going to achieve except more paperwork? Of course the press conferences were all focused on reassuring citizens that every effort would be made to round up the remaining syndicate members, but nobody had any faith in those kinds of statements anyway and the public were satisfied enough in the knowledge they’d seen the end of all the Red Dragons that counted. And so the unofficial line on Spike Spiegel was out of sight, out of mind. He would be discharged as soon as the risk of infection had definitely passed, and before anyone was any the wiser, except the few doctors Jet had paid off once they’d started to wonder why he didn’t have a police badge to go with the number he’d recited. The one thing you could rely on about Tharsis was that every institution was corrupt.

The whole story was recounted so matter-of-factly that anyone who didn't know better would have sworn this strange mismatched pair, the remaining dregs of his crewmates, didn't really care either way. It was just another debriefing at the end of a job: Jet listing the sequence of events so precisely you could almost see the bullet points punctuating the air; Faye indulging in her disgusting habit of chewing on strands of her own hair - something she did when she wanted you to know she was bored - as readily as if she had never once complained of (in her words) the profound tragedy that was her split ends.

Spike didn’t want to let the trouble they had taken touch him. He felt they had conspired with the Universe against him, to lock him out of his own fate. The day they moved him back into the ship was by far the worst. He thought they must have known all along he would end up back at square fucking one alongside them. Well, here they all were - apart from the kid and the dog being gone, it was like nothing had changed at all. The two of them seemed to be sticking with him simply because it was what they were now used to doing, part of some arbitrary routine.

Hell, the routine of it. Or more like purgatory. Now he was off the morphine he could feel it, the vast flat heaviness of the boredom settling into all his corners. It made him feel a thousand years old. And it was there no matter what, whether he was performing another excruciating round of his daily therapeutic exercises or blasting tinny music at top volume through his shitty headphones until his ears rang or watching the milk turn his cereal to mush.

Time was not fluid anymore. Time was an immovable monolith casting its shadow over him. Day after day just a great big zero. Zero plus zero equals more zero. It was all the same amount of meaningless. He knew it had turned him cliché, like a poor imitation of something out of Camus, but he didn’t care about that either. If a cliché was something hollow then so was he.

He found himself trying to stir up arguments for no reason except to treat them as a removed kind of experiment.

'What's the deal with you and Jet, anyway?' he snapped one day, as Faye began noisily gathering up his collection of used glasses from his room, without bothering to knock. It was the first time he’d spoken to her without Jet being around. Spike often overheard them whispering in conspiratorial tones when they thought he was asleep.

He saw Faye tense. 'You planning your wedding or something?' he prodded.

One of the glasses had stale water in it. He briefly braced himself for her to throw it at him, but Faye just looked at him, walked out, and came back with a topped-up glass. She surely enjoyed making him wait.

'Drink this and go back to sleep,' she said in an antiseptic tone.

He tried a different tack.

'Wait, no, let me guess - Jet’s adopting you.’

This jab, too, he had been expecting to rankle, since it came cruelly close to bringing up the whole family thing - but all she did was raise an eyebrow. It was curious. He had always relied on her to be the unreasonable one.

‘So what do you two talk about all day, then?’

'Not you,' said Faye. 'If that's what you think. Drink the water.'

Of course he thought that. 'Not me. Absolutely. Okay - what, then? Lipstick? Engine parts? What the fuck do you even have in common, anyway.'

Faye frowned. Just when Spike thought he might have hit upon something, she replied in the frank voice he still wasn’t used to hearing from her:

'Ed.’

He had not expected that at all.

‘Imagine that, Spike,’ Faye said, and her voice was measured even as she put the glass down clumsily hard, water sloshing over the side. ‘It turns out that not everything in the fucking universe is about you.’


	2. Chapter 2

The water in the marina was slate-gray today, Faye noted with satisfaction as she waited for the  _ Bebop  _ exit hatch to rattle all the way up. She hardly enjoyed the colorless dread that everything on Mars blanketed her in, but at least at this time of year it didn’t look a thing like Singapore. 

The trouble was, even things that didn’t look like her old life could jump out and trick her. She could be turning a corner and something as innocuous as the particular way the light hit the sidewalk could shift and splinter any thin perception she’d had of where she was in space. Worst of all were the heedless moments she would think of calling her mother or even  _ going home  _ before she remembered that no matter where she was in the universe, and for the rest of her life, these things would never again be possible. 

At first she had raged against it, trying to simply will herself out of the present day. She had barely eaten, like consuming anything would keep her rooted there. Mostly she had just done a lot of angry crying. Down on the floor, heavy with the fact that no matter how far away through time and space she ached to be, her body would hold fast. But after a while, she’d stopped thinking of that as a bad thing. Another onslaught of memories would send her hurtling into a dizzy panic about where and who she was, and if she didn’t look for anything to anchor her she felt like she might be in freefall forever. Alice falling down the rabbit hole. There had to be a bottom. 

It turned out that bottom belonged to a very sad carton of noodles, when she finally gave in to her stomach (and to Jet) after almost two straight days of eating nothing. She ate them like a starved wild animal. The noodles had been her least favorite flavour - far too salty - and she’d burned her mouth on them, but she had to admit that maybe they made her feel a little less like dying. Jet had helpfully not said a word when she’d asked for another carton. 

After that, she’d found she was able to perform other executive functions, like shower again, and wear daytime clothes, and take walks. So far, Faye had even partaken of - to her own astonishment - the occasional ship chore. 

It was only partly that she relished being able to play the martyr. Venturing down the gangway, she thought of Spike’s face when she’d said that great line about the universe not revolving around him. It had felt good, substantial, to say. Almost normal. Granted, it had been strange to have spoken to him in full sentences after so long avoiding it. And she knew he was mired in his version of grief, one as personal and private as her own. But he was being a weirdo about her and Jet. Not to mention she was worried he had caught on to their secret about what was currently sitting in the  _ Bebop  _ hangar, which neither she nor Jet had figured out how to explain yet. 

Plus she really did miss Ed. So there. 

Besides, she wasn't  _ just _ helping to rub it in anyone’s face or guilt-trip them. There were still many things she would do for even a snatched moment of petty vindication, but this was not the only reason she was now marching herself off the ship with the last of the money in search of, horror of horrors, something resembling a real job. She knew she could not find what she was looking for in the outlines of her old house in the dirt, or by shooting Spike in the leg so he couldn’t leave, and definitely not (though she was still always fantasizing about it) simply sitting at the top of the stairs and hollering until a proper grownup materialised and made it all go away forever. She really didn’t want to have to be the grownup herself, to go out onto this dreadful planet and get a job and use her money to help people who would probably never even think to say thank you properly.

But here she was, and she never did anything she didn’t really want to do, so it must be that part of her actually did, kind of. She had volunteered the idea herself after Jet began to run out of non-essential  _ Bebop  _ parts to sell (and both of them seemed to have silently agreed that bounty hunting was a money-making scheme relegated to the back burner). Jet had been antsy about it at first, worried about rogue Red Dragons. The idea any of them could still be out there, not to mention an increased ISSP presence, was hardly her favourite either. But Jet knew as well as she did they were stranded as long as Spike needed access to medical care.

‘Well, it’d sure be good for you to do something honest for a change,’ he’d conceded. Faye had scoffed at the idea, had insisted it was only in times of dire financial necessity that she would ever sink to such a thing as honest work and it could never be good for her. Privately, though, she did want to see if she could actually achieve something without any lying or shooting things. And the freefalling sensation still came to upend her often enough that she knew she’d need to do more to keep it at bay. 

Now, Faye looked mournfully on the display of cosmetics winking at her as she passed a pharmacy window, feeling the precious woolongs burning in her coat pocket, but also the new (terrible, alien, adult) sensation of having More Important things to do. She forced herself to walk past, and relinquish the money instead to a ticket machine for the public shuttle bus that would take her into midtown. It felt wrong to travel in this inefficient and vulnerable way, without being able to rely on her Redtail to zoom her out of danger if anyone were to come looking for her, but she knew she’d never find a cheap enough place to dock it when everywhere in town required permits - permits being the kind of boring thing she must think about these days. 

Besides, she knew now about things she cared about and wanted more than a few new tubes of lipstick or the freedom to aimlessly cruise about the universe. An awful lot more.


	3. Chapter 3

Jet had something to tell him. He had wheeled him in the hospital-issue chair, which Spike had to use sometimes after his exercises took the wind out of him, out onto the deck. Jet thought it was good for Spike, to breathe in the fresh air of the marina and have a smoke that would not settle around him into a stale funk. It still wasn’t ideal. Sometimes Spike swore he could smell the fish that used to be hauled on deck, although Jet insisted that Spike’s senses were far too delicate and that it was a mere phantom smell, or one of the other fishing ships in the harbour (Jet got very defensive about the  _ Bebop _ ). 

Today, though, Spike was certain he detected a whiff of it, along with the tang of rusty pipes somewhere - like blood. It was trace evidence that the ship had already lived another life, although Jet took good care to keep her looking new. Spike sympathised with the old girl. 

‘So what is it?’ he asked reluctantly. 

Jet looked up at a group of gulls circling over the water some way off. ‘I don’t know how to say this, Spike…’ he began, with the strained expression of a man who believed equally in his right not to engage in difficult conversations and his absolute duty to do so. 

Spike cut him off. ‘Wait a second. I need one of these.’ He fumbled in the pocket of his trench coat, draped over his knees, for his cigarette papers. He had taken to rolling his smokes. It occupied his hands, which he had trained to stop shaking quite so much, although the pain in his shoulder meant it was still difficult to maneuver with anything that could honestly be called skill. 

Spike, pulling tobacco from its pouch, sighed, ‘Okay, shoot. Good news or bad news?’

‘I don’t know if you’ll like it or not. Both?’ 

‘Hell, Jet - make your damn  _ mind _ up.’ He licked the edge of the paper and rolled up the tobacco into a sloppy but satisfactory cigarette shape. ‘Go on.’

‘It’s about her… Julia.’

The movements of the gulls suddenly became very fascinating to Spike. 

Jet went on, ‘Look, this was probably out of line, and I’ll get it if you’re mad. But that buddy of mine - a little while back he tipped me off that the ISSP were about to widen their evidence sweep? Beats me why they acted so slow but that’s the ISSP for you, can’t find their way out of a paper bag. Anyway, we wanted to be sure they wouldn’t find anything to connect you. And Faye told me that Julia’d had this pretty flashy car with her that you both went off in. So we kinda… went looking for it.’

_ ‘That’s _ what you’ve been whispering about?’ It was the only part Spike could process. Both of them had been in on it? 

‘We haven’t been - well, maybe. Anyway. We went out and we found the car.’ 

‘What, you did this when I was asleep or something?’ 

‘Yeah,’ Jet admitted guiltily. ‘In the night one time. I’m sorry. We were afraid to ask. In case you... I don’t know. I don’t know what we thought. There was a lot happening at once and we just acted fast.’

‘And you did what with it, exactly? Pushed it in the river?’ It couldn’t be normal, thought Spike, that all he could focus on were the logistics of it. 

‘Of course not! We’ve been keeping it safe, Spike. It’s actually - ’ Jet winced ‘- in the hangar now’.

‘What!’

‘Sorry!’ Jet apologised again. ‘We weren’t sure what to do with it for ages, or how to tell you. And it’s pretty badly scratched up, you know, shot at. Surprised nobody phoned it in before, to be honest.’

‘Nobody blinks an eye at that stuff round here,’ Spike said in a flat voice. ‘Probably would’ve stood out more if it weren’t beat up.’

‘Here’s the good news, though. It looks pretty easy to fix up.’ 

_‘_ Really.' Spike realised he had not even lit his cigarette, and fumbled to do so.

‘I even sent Doohan some pictures to make sure. It’s mainly cosmetic. Still drives, obviously.’

‘And you’re only just telling me this now?’ Spike’s irritation sparked with the flint of his lighter, which he knew he was thumbing a little too aggressively. 

‘I knew I would get this wrong,’ said Jet. ‘Look, we don’t have to do anything you don’t wanna do. We can get it patched up, or we can send it to the scrap heap. Your call. I wanted you to know you got options, that’s all.’

Options. Spike didn’t want options. Cursing the velocity at which they were constantly forcing themselves on him, he overestimated his first inhale and tried desperately to stop himself coughing. Coughing made him feel as though his ribcage was bursting open like a sci-fi horror scene.

‘Okay,’ he choked out, more to distract from his obvious discomfort than anything else, waving Jet’s hovering hands away before he could kick up a fuss. ‘Give it to Doohan, I don’t care. Give him something to…. something to do.’ 

Too late, he could feel the coughs rattling up to the surface. He did his best not to seem in pain even though they went through him like gunshots. 

‘Okay,’ said Jet quietly, when Spike had done. ‘Okay, I’ll tell him. And Spike… do you want to take a look at it, now? I mean, the car, and there was some other stuff inside it. We weren’t prying! But the lock on the trunk was kinda loose. Lucky, too, that’s where we found the keys. Plan was to try and hotwire it but I guess she kept a spare set in there. Saved us a whole lot of trouble.’

The anger finally hit Spike square on. Forget anything else that had happened, this right here was the cruelest hand the universe had played him. But right then it wasn’t the universe he was angry at, or Vicious, or even Jet and Faye for going behind his back, but somehow Julia herself. How much it felt like she had orchestrated this on purpose.

Spike still carried Julia’s memory with him, of course, but not as before, not close to the surface. He could remember what it was like being with her, but only when he thought about it - and he tried not to do too much of that these days, like how he would force himself to think of anything other than food when he was starving and there was nothing on the ship. Keeping it background noise. Once he had a dream where she was with him, but she was not Julia, she was a tree, and somehow this made perfect sense: he tried and tried to become a tree too, managed to will patches of bark to spring up all over his skin, but as soon as they appeared, they faded back to useless flesh again, until he awoke damp with sweat, and itchy all over from his bandages. 

What was he supposed to do with it, he thought as Jet solemnly steered him into the hangar, and there it was, with blown-out windows and torn-up seats from a rain of indiscriminate Dragon bullets. When Jet quietly pulled a suitcase from the dented trunk and laid out its contents, of which Spike recognised nothing: spare cartridges, spare boots, spare clothes; a cracked leather wallet; a compact bag of toiletries. Where was he supposed to put all of his hurt and anger when he didn’t even know what to do with these things? 

He picked up a black sweater and surreptitiously put his face close to it. Fresh from a store. So all he had of her life was the car they’d driven to her death in. Julia, with her curious mix of pragmatism and romanticism, had run away with nothing of any sentimental value on her person but the wheels that were to take her away. Why had she made this her one nod to the dramatic? Maybe if she’d gotten herself a new car that didn’t stick out like such a sore thumb, they never would have found her and she never would have died. 

‘Can you just get rid of the rest of this stuff?’ he said in a low voice. ‘Anything we can’t use, at least.’ 

Jet nodded, then wordlessly pulled a thin wad of woolongs from the wallet and held them up. Spike nodded back. At least they both knew what to do with those. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realised a mistake here, which is that Julia's car in fact gets blown up in canon. Oops! AU in which that doesn't happen lol


	4. Chapter 4

The weeks went by and Spike deliberately did not ask after the progress of the car. He knew from eavesdropping that Jet had asked Doohan to recommend a good Mars-based mechanic to come and look at it, since actually getting the car to him wasn’t really an option; that new parts were being ordered, some of which would come from Doohan’s own workshop, and would take a while to come in. 

More than once, Spike regretted agreeing to it at all, but he couldn’t help looking forward to seeing it finished just so he could work on making it mean nothing to him again. He badly missed the numbness that had coated him in the immediate aftermath of everything. He had understood only when Jet’s announcement had stripped it away, like a blanket being ripped from his body on a cold harsh morning, just how much it had been protecting him. Spike needed to get back to that place and it seemed to him he would only find it if he could subsume this car back into nothingness. 

He was propped up on the couch watching a gameshow one early afternoon of what might have been a Thursday when Jet came to tell him the guy was finishing up. Spike muted the TV but kept his eyes firmly fixed on the tiny figures, who were involved in throwing themselves from various giant foam obstacles and trying to reach the end goal of a plastic trophy at the far end of a deep pool of water. 

‘He’s just driving it around the block,’ said Jet. ‘Wanna come see or not?’

‘Are you just trying to lure me out so he’ll pass the invoice to me?’ deadpanned Spike, watching a foam wrecking ball send one of the figures flying. The other teammates all shouted silently, their hands either held to their faces or gesticulating wildly.

Jet ignored the bad joke. ‘He did us a pretty good deal, once I mentioned Doohan.’ Spike wondered how big a chunk of Julia’s stash would go towards this bill and if there would be any left for a week’s groceries, or a few days’, or none at all. 

‘He’s due back any minute,’ added Jet, when Spike still did not move. He yawned and looked over. Jet stood with his hands on the back of Spike’s wheelchair - except it wasn’t his chair, the one from the hospital, at all. It was a slimmer model, metallic all over instead of grey plastic and had what looked like a joystick on one arm. 

‘What’s that.’

‘It’s from Doohan,’ said Jet. ‘Said he put it together himself. He sent it over with the car parts, a surprise. Mechanical, so you can move yourself around.’ 

Spike could honestly have said that for the first time in weeks, he actually was surprised. He would not have thought he still had the capacity. 

‘That son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘That means I’ll owe him a favor now.’

Jet looked like he was trying not to smile. He kicked up the chair’s brake and wheeled it closer. ‘Need a hand?’

Spike braced himself for the wave of pain that always came when he sat up, then allowed Jet to help maneuver him from couch to chair. Both of them defaulted to the system they’d developed to make the change as efficiently as possible without going too fast for Spike to physically bear. 

‘What do you think?’ Jet asked when Spike had done testing out the controls, easier said than done when his dominant arm was attached to a shoulder that had been skewered like it had, though Doohan had evidently done his research and fitted them to be on what was for now Spike’s good side. 

‘I think I got it,’ Spike replied, even though he’d almost just gone shooting straight into the TV. He could not get over the thought that he would be able to actually go all the way from one side of the ship to the other without Jet behind him at all times. Such luxury had but yesterday seemed impossibly out of reach. 

He wheeled himself backwards to grab the remote and thrilled at the motion, pressing the off switch just as one of the contestants had managed to struggle from the water and fling themselves on top of the platform holding the trophy. 

‘You’d better show me about this car, then,’ Spike said. He hoped that his voice did not give anything away, but he wasn’t sure he’d succeeded when he saw that Jet still seemed to be holding back a smile. 


	5. Chapter 5

‘Heard you got a couple new sets of wheels today.’

Faye was sat cross-legged on the couch, examining a stapled-together bunch of papers, when Spike wheeled himself back into the common area that evening. He hadn’t seen or heard her come in, but he knew she’d been off gallivanting somewhere all day - as evidenced by a trail of stuff including her coat, bag and shoes, strewn unhelpfully in his path. 

‘Can you move this,’ he said flatly, as Faye had not bothered to look up. ‘I can’t get past’. She raised her head and looked at him uncomprehendingly, clearly still more absorbed in what was on the papers. It was infuriating she’d even pretended to ask him about his day. Well, he didn’t really feel like sharing his feelings on the matter anyway. 

Spike swept his hand over the stuff and made an exaggerated show of staring at it, then back at his wheelchair, until Faye realised what he meant.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Just a second’. 

With what seemed like deliberate haphazardness, Faye gathered all of her junk up into a pile against her chest, dropping first one shoe, then the other, before walking just a few short steps across the room and letting it all drop in a pile again. Even though they had a coat rack  _ right there. _ Spike had not failed to notice that while Faye had technically been doing more around the place lately, it was not exactly to the standard you could call tidying. More like migrating things around until they  _ eventually  _ found their proper place. 

Still, it was a change from the old days, when she would be more likely to throw things at him than deign to move them out of his way. She had not come close to the former for a while, and had mostly kept her distance since his stunted attempt at an argument with her. 

‘Wow, don’t trouble yourself’. Spike shook his head and wheeled himself over the now empty surface to align himself with the armchair. He’d not yet tried a solo transition from one chair to the other, but he was feeling optimistic about it today, and tensed his good arm as he gripped the wheelchair side. 

‘Hey!’ rang out Faye’s voice, as Spike realised his mistake halfway up to standing. One arm was not going to be enough to bear his weight, and the wheelchair, which he’d forgotten you were supposed to put the brakes on, was already moving backwards away from him. Before he fully could understand what was happening, Faye was roughly throwing her arms around him.

‘Stop, stop! Ow!’ yelled Spike, and, ‘Fuck, fuck!’ Faye was yelling back as she staggered to one side, clearly having misjudged her strength as badly as he’d misjudged his ability to stand. It was not at all like being helped up by Jet, and in fact felt like the opposite of being helped, as Faye only just avoided tripping over the wheelchair and bringing them both crashing to the floor. His shoulder and chest wounds howled in protest as a panicked Faye managed to half drag, half push him onto the armchair.

‘Jesus, Faye!’

‘What the hell, Spike,’ was her own pained response as she pulled back away from him. ‘You stupid - !’ She crouched down slightly and clutched at her side, while Spike leaned back, groaning. He could see starbursts when he closed his eyes, pulsating in rhythm with his pain.

‘I was trying to  _ help _ ,’ Faye added indignantly, before her voice lowered. ‘Uh - are you okay?’ 

‘Shut up,’ said Spike through gritted teeth, still desperate for the worst of the pain to hurry up and pass, and for his heart to slow down again. After several lifetime-long seconds, he opened his eyes and saw Faye bent over him - looking guilty. 

‘I was trying to help,’ she repeated. ‘That was your own fault, you know.’

‘I would have been fine!’

‘Your ass was about to fall smack on the floor,’ Faye said in a sour voice, but she was still bent close to him. He saw her hand hover as if to touch him again, and he tensed, but she moved it up to tuck her hair behind her ear. ‘Is your - is it going to be okay?’ 

Spike looked down at his torso and gingerly felt for his dressings under his shirt. As far as he could tell, nothing had opened up again, even though it damn well felt like it. 

‘For the sake of your conscience, Faye, let’s say it is’. 

There was a strained silence. ‘Well, you’re welcome,’ said Faye. ‘But don’t do that again, lunkhead.’

‘Yeah, okay - thanks,’ said Spike, sarcastically at first, then opting for a margin more sincerity, ‘Thank you.’ 

She had called him lunkhead.

Faye shook her head. ‘Wow. For such a skinny guy, you sure weigh a ton. I need a cigarette,’ she added. 

Spike felt his pain recede a few blessed more notches as he focused on watching her fish around her bag and find a box of straights. ‘Want one?’ she mumbled round the side of the one she’d placed in her mouth, saying it casually but in a way he found disarming. Faye never shared cigarettes. 

‘Really? You’d splash out on me?’

‘Maybe just this once.’ She held out the box. ‘I think I can spare one. I actually got a job today’. 

Ah, so that’s what she was doing. More lording it over him. Spike didn’t care if it was bait - he took the cigarette and her lighter gratefully. Rolling his own was a mildly diverting activity, but the things just didn’t taste the same. 

‘A job,’ he said, after several much-needed drags, satisfied in knowing she’d have been waiting for him to ask. He did vaguely recall Jet telling him that she’d been spending a lot of time knocking around town looking for a living. Spike didn’t appreciate the implication he should be indebted to her, just because she’d finally realised a normal job was something most people have to go out and do every day. ‘Doing what, exactly? Cheating more clueless losers out of their hard-earned cash at the Blackjack table?’

‘It’s in a vintage emporium,’ she replied, not bothering to defend this jab at her past enterprising. 

‘A what?’

‘You know,’ tutted Faye, rolling her eyes. ‘Where they sell old junk that’s become fashionable again.’ 

‘Ah, old junk. So, perfect for you then, being an old lady.’ Spike could have kicked himself, immediately realising he had referenced her past, but Faye was grabbing her papers and waving them in his face.

‘This is my contract, look. So I walked into this old store, I thought that I needed new clothes because every time I tried to ask someone for a job they said I was unemployable in… this,’ she plucked at her shorts and Spike snorted, ‘... and I thought that oh, maybe second-hand stuff would be cheap ‘cause it’s been used. Well, this stuff is  _ not  _ cheap even though some of it’s  _ real  _ old. Like, my time old,’ and she looked at him meaningully, as if to say she had taken his jibe in good humour. ‘Actually, turns out it being so ancient makes it  _ way more expensive _ . Some of it’s technically antique, not even vintage. And it’s designer labels! So I started telling the guy at the desk, turns out he’s the owner by the way, I started telling him that I know all about this stuff, I used to own a bag just like this! And at first he didn’t believe me, but I knew the answers to all the questions he asked and he said that I would probably look good in the clothes, which is true, so anyway in the end I convinced him to hire me and the best part is if I sell something, because it’s so expensive, I make  _ commission _ .’ 

She had rarely volunteered so many words to him at once, and he realised she was actually excited about having the job. As if the idea of her signing anything as binding as a contract wasn’t absurd enough. 

‘Uh, great. I can’t wait for us to become millionaires.’

‘Hey. I know it’s not much, Spike,’ she said, sour again. She stubbed out her cigarette and clutched the contract to her chest. ‘Never mind.’

‘No, look, good for you,’ said Spike. He thought of her watching that tape of herself and wondered if she knew what she was doing, surrounding herself with so many tangible memories. 

But then, wasn’t he doing the same by accepting this car back into his life?  _ You’re the one that’s tied to the past, Spike.  _ He cleared his throat. ‘Makes a change from the bounty-hunting way of life, anyway’. 

‘That’s an understatement.’ Faye sat down, looked at her knees, then towards the kitchen. ‘I wonder if Jet needs a hand.’ She still sounded a little hurt; definitely defensive.

‘He’d say he always does.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Faye, quickly standing up again as if to leave. But then she turned and said haltingly, ‘I do think it’s something - about your car, by the way’. 

So she had been interested after all. 

‘I saw it on my way in. Nice.’

‘You’ve seen it before,’ Spike reminded her. He tried to see what her face did, but she was too far across the room. It was however not lost on him that a person entering the  _ Bebop  _ on foot would have to go out of their way to walk past the hangar. 

‘I mean nice fix-up job’. 

‘It’s in a better state than I am, anyway.’ 

Even though the chair incident had left what felt like fresh bruises on him, and had certainly bruised his ego, he couldn’t quite make it sound as jaded as he intended. 

There had been something in the day, unlike the countless before it, that held a distinctly possible shape. 


	6. Chapter 6

'Let's go on a trip,' he said to Jet one day, when enough time had passed for him to make it sound like an out of the blue suggestion. He was sick of only seeing the inside of the ship’s walls or the marina outside, and even though the car was supposed to mean nothing to him, it did seem a waste not to fulfil its intended purpose. 

Jet’s eyebrows assumed their standardized _don't try me_ expression. 'A trip? What are you talking about? You mean you want me to move the _Bebop?_ It’s pretty out-of-action at the moment, in case you hadn’t noticed. I haven’t been able to buy back those parts yet.' 

‘I don’t mean the _Bebop,_ ' said Spike, mentally trying to dodge his guilt at that latter statement. Despite Faye’s ideas about how swish her new job was, Jet was still having to pawn parts of the ship, which were now starting to include those essential to its being able to move. 

'You mean your Swordfish? Kind of a tight fit for two people, wouldn't ya say?' 

'No, I know that. Just listen. I'm talking about the car.' 

Jet tried to look surprised, although Spike suspected he had known what he’d meant the whole time. 

‘The whole reason we went out to get the car, Spike, was because you could have been seen in it. You’re supposed to be invisible right now.’

‘So?’ said Spike. ‘It was never actually pinned to any crime scene, was it? It was never there. I was never there.’

‘It was there long enough that someone could have seen it. Why risk jogging anyone’s memory?’ 

‘Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?’ quoted Spike grandly. ‘Hunter S. Thompson.’ 

‘Wasn’t that guy on drugs?’ 

‘I’m just saying. I can’t hide away forever. And what are the chances, really? If we steer clear of town?’ 

Jet scratched his head and sighed. 'You're still supposed to be resting, Spike.' 

'I will be resting. Think about it, I'm serious. You drive, I sit. We can recline the seat back and everything.' He tried to stay cool, knowing as he did by now that the best way to convince Jet of anything was to present it in the form of a calculated risk assessment. 'It’s no different from my wheelchair, really. You can drive as slowly as you like.' 

Jet still looked hesitant. 'I just want to look at something other than this rust stain,' Spike added, infusing his voice with the subtlest lilt of martyrdom as he exhibited the offending area with an exasperated gesture, 'it's like the Rorschach test from hell.' 

'I don't know,' said Jet, looking towards the door. ‘Faye?' He stuck his head out and called down the corridor. 

Spike gritted his teeth and tried not to rail against the fact that lately, everything was a fucking family meeting. 

'Spike wants to _go on a trip,'_ Jet explained when she came in, with the same incredulous intonation as if he were saying, _Spike wants to dance the paso doble_. 'I'm not sure that's such a great idea, are you?’

She's not going to think it’s a good idea if you ask such leading questions, Spike fumed silently, but said nothing. 

'A trip? In the Swordfish?' asked Faye, sounding surprised and looking at Jet as if Spike were not, in fact, right there. 

'No,' said Spike patiently, 'not in my Swordfish. In the car.' 

'The - ? Oh.' This time, he saw the flicker on her face; the association of the car with Julia. 'Right.' 

Jet cut in. ‘What if there are still… people looking for him? _Even’ -_ Jet raised his hands to stop Spike’s protest - ‘even if not the police, what if there are still syndicate guys out there?’ 

The air felt momentarily heavier. Spike made a show of rolling his eyes. 

‘They’ll be in chaos. Those guys, all they ever knew was following orders. They’d be too busy squabbling amongst themselves to notice even if I walked straight into them.’

He looked to Faye, who widened her eyes in an indignant _don’t look at me_ expression.

‘Why am I the arbitrator of this? Makes no difference to me.’

'You say that, but hey, you probably know more about cars than Jet. You could drive me.' _Oh hell, you made it weird_ , Spike thought as soon as he said it - but it did make sense. Faye had grown up in a century where everybody still drove cars. And it was just that: a car. _Not_ equal to Julia. 

'Oh, could I?' At this assumption, she put her hands on her hips, which he found pleasingly familiar. 

'Yeah, you know, they’re more old school. More up your street, being an antiques expert now. Come _on._ You must be bored of the same routine by now, right?' 

If he could get her on his side, they could surely between the two of them convince Jet. Come to think of it, this was a far more tactical approach than asking Jet himself. She had always been more suggestible. 'We can go wherever you like, for as long as you like. Your choice of radio station.' He paused. 'I'll even buy you dinner.' 

He knew he had cracked her. He could see the excitement at the possibility of an adventure, however small, playing out on her face. And the food was an inspired touch. Really, this was a favor to her. It was a win-win situation. He tried to communicate all this through the lift in his eyebrows, without saying it aloud for Jet to hear. 

Faye turned to Jet with her palms upturned. 'Oh, well, what harm can it really do? It might get him to stop moping for a few days. I’m sure nobody will pay attention to us, if we stick to the highways. If anyone _was_ after him,' she added seriously, ‘they’d have found him by now anyway. I’ve been out almost every day, anyone worth their salt would know they could follow me back here.’ 

Jet pulled another one of his standard looks, his weary eyes to the heavens one. 'Fine. Fine. But don't go too fast, or anywhere too populated. And don't be gone too long. _Don’t_ let the hood down. And make sure you have enough fuel, and enough water, and ...' 

He was listing other things, but Spike wasn't listening; in his mind he was already out on the open road. Even if it was just a sliver, and one he had to rely on Faye for at that, it was a type of freedom. Nothing at all weird about that.


	7. Chapter 7

'Which way?' Faye asked, when she pulled up to their first stop sign.

‘How about you choose? Look, there’s nothing coming, just go left or right - it doesn’t matter.’ Faye was peering intently both ways, back and forth, looking for traffic that clearly was not there. 

‘Seriously? You’re not going to boss me around? I thought that was the object of this trip,’ she said, squinting into the distance. 

‘I told you I’d leave things up to you. Just c’mon! Before I change my mind.’   
  


‘Okay, look, hang on. There’s a truck coming now,’ she said, almost triumphantly. Spike refrained from retorting that they still had time to go, and in fact could have gone already if she had not been dawdling in the first place. Right now was one of the rare times he would rather not pick a fight.    
  


The truck swept past them, and Spike savored the rush of fresh air that drenched his head. He had specifically made her put the top down despite Jet’s warnings, although it was a typically cold Mars day, so that he could taste the open road. Faye had seemed a little anxious at this, but he knew she also thought it looked way cooler. 

Faye waited until the truck was long gone, then maneuvered left, remaining quiet with concentration. He could tell she was not just worried about keeping him safe, but about the car, too. He didn't like it (nor did he like the realisation that Faye had most likely been the one to drive it back the night of her and Jet’s recovery mission). Julia had loved this car for its age, claiming it was what gave it character, but had never treated it with caution; had respected it enough to know just how much it could withstand. Of course, he couldn’t say all that, so she kept them creeping along at a boring, civilized speed. Well - at least they would take their time getting back. 

The silence, always the recurring theme with them, continued for a long while. Spike could not have said where along the line it passed from a tense into a comfortable one. At one point, they did try to turn on the radio, but found that this was apparently the one thing that hadn't been repaired. They stuck close to the water, until the sun began to set, and the clusters of Mars bugs pelleting towards them became swarms. They rolled up the hood and took to the highway, where they could see great dusty violet shadows thrown over the distant sides of the Tharsis crater. 

'Are you hungry?' Faye asked eventually, which he knew meant  _ she  _ was hungry, though he was not. She wouldn’t have forgotten his promise. 

'Let's stop somewhere,' he agreed. 'And oh, by the way. Should have remembered this sooner, but I don't really have any money right now, remember? What with the being hospitalised and everything, so... I might have to owe you for some other time. Y'know, for dinner.' The look on her face was priceless.

'Oh, come on!' She slumped in a dangerously exaggerated affect against the steering wheel. 'I  _ knew _ that, didn’t I? Can’t believe I bought that even for a second. God, well, I'm too starved to talk about how much of a  _ lunkhead  _ you are for that. Let’s just find a place.' 

Spike looked out of the window to hide his smile. 

Faye guided them back off the highway and pulled up to a service station, which had a fast-food joint where she ordered fries. She ate them slowly and self-consciously at first, then with increasing relish. She didn't stop to ask if Spike wanted any until the end, when she left two: pushing the carton towards him with an expression that implied she considered this an exceptionally generous gesture. Spike declined - though his own stomach was starting to rumble now - disgusted at the amount of ketchup she had used. It had formed a small quagmire at the bottom, the cardboard reduced to a pulpy tomato crime scene. 

'Suit yourself.' She balled up her napkin and stuffed it in the carton, then looked around the car for a place to put it. Spike had been so immersed in the entire unappetizing display that he had forgotten what car exactly they were in, and gave a small yelp. 

'Find a trashcan for that, for god's sake why don't you?' 

'Al _ right _ . I was going to,' lied Faye. She looked guilty as she climbed out the car and lolloped off towards the appropriate receptacle, stopping to rub her stiff legs. Well, good. Maybe he wanted her to drive the thing a little faster, but he sure as hell didn't want ketchup all over it. The thought of her getting that comfortable in it - now,  _ that _ was weird. 

Watching her, Spike wondered about what she was like at work. Surely she must hate it, if it meant having to deal with customers. But she hadn’t complained about it yet, which was kind of astonishing. 

He wondered other things about her, too. 'You ever drive a car like this before?' he asked, when she returned, because he was genuinely interested. He had always taken it for granted that Julia's was 'authentic', that everyone on Earth had whizzed around in style like this once upon a time. Now he wondered how true it was. He had never stopped to think, since learning the truth of her accident, that Faye would have the answer to everything you could ever want to know about old Earth. Incredible, really. 

'No, not as nice as this,' she replied thoughtfully, and he was glad to hear she was not reluctant to talk. He wouldn't go near her family junk, no way; but if this was okay, he definitely wanted to know. She even seemed glad of the conversation, because she added, 'I did have a car, though. What was it? Also a convertible, I think.' She laughed, clearly more to herself than for his benefit. 'Definitely a rich kid car, anyway.' 

Spike tried to imagine Faye rich. In a way, it explained a lot: why she always took so many long showers with no consideration for hot water wastage, for one thing. 

'But did you see many of these around?' he pressed on. 

'This old thing?' She rubbed the seat upholstery. 'No, this kind was rare even back then. It's probably from the 'fifties, I'd say. Sorry, that's  _ nineteen  _ fifties to you.’ She paused. ‘How in the hell  _ is _ this still functioning anyway? A car over a hundred years old?' 

'How do you think? Doohan. He’s a genius. He wasn't always mad on aircraft, you know. This was his phase before that.' That had been a long time ago now. Spike had been with Julia when she bought the car. She’d been the one to introduce him to Doohan in the first place, when he’d still been living on Mars. They were friends because they both had a passion for antiques: Doohan for the challenge of putting broken things back together, Julia for the stories they carried. He didn't say all that to Faye, but it occurred to Spike that Julia would probably have been fascinated by her, had she ever gotten to know her story. 

'Huh. It's real classy, anyway. Classier than anything I ever owned.' She patted the seat approvingly, and he found himself more comforted by this than anything else she had done for him in his recovery.

‘I’ll bet.’ 

Faye smiled at him. Well - she wasn’t exactly looking at him. But it was for his benefit this time. And genuine at that. 

‘You’ve yet to make a bet against me that you actually have a real chance of winning.’ 

He laughed. ‘Oh, because you’re always that one step ahead of me? I’ve won plenty of bets against you. You’re lucky I haven’t kept score. You know, for a professional poker player, you’re not so hard to read, Faye.’ This was true enough. Upon meeting Faye, Spike had very quickly come to understand all he needed to know about about her, which was that everything she did was to keep people from knowing anything about her at all. In this sense he could read her like a book. It was just a case of understanding the book to be complete fiction, and in a language he didn’t actually speak. Easy.

‘You’re not so mysterious yourself,’ said Faye. ‘Just because you speak in riddles half the time.’

‘I do not speak in riddles.’

‘Once upon a time there was a poor-old-sad-old tiger…’

‘It’s not a tiger,’ said Spike, defensively. ‘It’s a tiger-striped  _ cat _ . And it’s a fable, not a riddle. And hang on, I’ve never told that one to you. Been eavesdropping at all lately?’

Faye looked pink all of a sudden, evidently realising what she had said. ‘Hey, I had to, sometimes! You would never tell me what was going on.’

‘Didn’t think I needed to. I thought my every move was so predictable to you.’ 

‘It was. It is. I just... wanted to be wrong, that particular time.’ 

The conversation had snuck up on them. Spike spoke before thinking. ‘Faye, I did at least tell you some things. That particular time, I mean.’ Too late, he remembered one of the very real things he did know about Faye: what she sounded like when she cried. He had a wild feeling for a moment that he should apologise, or touch her, or something.

But Faye, now busy trying to fit the keys back in the ignition, had apparently reached the inevitable point of the conversation where she would rather use the emergency exit hatch. ‘Jeez, it’s so dark I can barely see this thing. I didn’t realise. We should get back,’ she said as she scrabbled with the key, speaking as if none of it had happened at all. ‘I may be an old lady but I’m still too young to be killed by Jet.’ 

And that was it: the fastest she had steered them around anything all night. Spike was dizzy the whole way home.


	8. Chapter 8

‘You did a good job today.’

Faye looked back from the store’s glass-fronted door, her hand on the _Closed_ sign still halfway turned from _Open._ Jerome, proprietor of _Days Gone By_ vintage emporium (and now Faye’s boss of a full three weeks) stood over the ledger at the desk, his circular tinted glasses balanced atop his head as he always wore them while he scanned the day’s numbers. More unusual was the compliment. He did not look up at Faye, and she wondered if she’d heard right. Jerome had not said anything much to her so far that had not been strictly business, and usually to let her know she was doing it wrong. He was an exacting man of few words, except when it came to things like the hang of a garment or the grain of a particular type of wood, topics he had an immense knowledge of and vocabulary for. 

Faye finished turning the sign. ‘I did?’ she said doubtfully, and thought with a sticky feeling back to the moment earlier in the afternoon when she’d tripped on the ends of the dry-cleaning bags she was hauling and nearly gone crashing through the top of their one-of-a-kind, early 21st-century glass table (just sold). Jerome had been out to lunch but she was certain he must still somehow know. He always knew.

‘That client with the poorly tailored coat on, you know, with the buttons and the pockets?’ Faye did not know which person or what it was about their buttons or pockets she was supposed to recall, but Jerome went on, ‘He wouldn’t have paid what he did for that hold-all if it weren’t for you.’ 

Faye remembered now. ‘The guy who was worried about the broken zipper?’ 

‘You were good with convincing him.’

The sticky feeling began to lift from her a little. ‘Right. I guess I have my ways.’ 

‘You know what you’re talking about, too,’ Jerome went on. ‘You certainly have a lot of niche knowledge. Sure you don’t have any mystery qualifications hidden up your sleeve?’ 

‘Oh, I’ve just picked things up,’ said Faye vaguely, ‘you know, here and there.’ She still couldn’t believe the words  _ good job,  _ or really remember the last time anyone had told them to her - maybe her schooldays. She allowed the association to reach her. Lately her past seemed a great ocean, a line always on the horizon that she could neither escape nor hold onto, but that if she stood and waited long enough the tide would at times come back in from. She just had to be careful to keep away from the biggest waves.

‘Well, it shows with the clients,’ said Jerome briskly. ‘It translates into sales very nicely. Keep it up, and your commission keeps up too.’ He pushed his glasses back down and reached towards an envelope on the desk. ‘Before I forget. This came today. Do me a favour and put it up in the door on your way out?’ 

Faye walked to take the envelope, her step lighter than it usually was around him. ‘What’s it for?’ she asked, pulling out an orange and black vinyl sticker with elaborate stripes on it and turning it in her hands to try and make out its shape.

‘It’s a symbol - or, more like, a message. Many of the businesses around here have them up now. It means we won’t be intimidated.’

‘Intimidated?’ She realised now what she was looking at. A tiger. 

‘By those Red Dragons, you know. They’ve been the shame of this town for longer than anyone can remember.’ 

Faye felt momentarily that she’d been plunged underwater. Her own voice sounded far away as she said, ‘What, there’s a chance they’ll come? Here?’ But shouldn't she have seen this coming? As if going to her little job every day had been keeping danger away, not inviting it right back in? Of course the Dragons still had their claws in everything. She and Jet should never have taken the risk to stay here, no matter how bad Spike was. They should have gotten him far away first. Oh, fuck.

Jerome rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. ‘They’ve never come here. But everyone knows someone who’s been extorted in one way or another. Things are changing, mind you.’ He paused. ‘You look worried. It’s nothing to be concerned over. You heard about how they’ve more or less eaten their own tail, didn’t you? Some sort of failed coup recently. Stupid, really. They couldn’t stop killing each other in the end. It’s only the ones who weren’t important enough to be worth killing left, and they don’t scare us. This sign’s just our way of saying so, and that people can take their custom here in good conscience.’

Faye released her grip of the sticker, realising the edges were curling up. She tried counting the diamonds on the patterned rug to calm herself down. 

‘It’s not going to bring trouble, understand? You know, in stories, the tiger is a protector figure. It means you’re safe.’ He became stern again. ‘This is what you tell the clients too, if they ask - got it?’

‘Got it,’ said Faye. ‘Nothing to be scared of. I wasn’t, anyway.’

He gave a tight nod. ‘Good. Alright, I’ll let you lock up, I have an appointment to make. Be sure not to let any air bubbles get into that.’ 

He took his own immaculately tailored coat from the hook and enveloped himself in it with a decisive flourish of fabric. Jerome was shorter than her, but somehow the clothes he wore made him look much taller. Watching all 5ft 4 of him swing out of the door with his impeccable posture, Faye had to admit she couldn’t picture him easily intimidated by anyone, even a Red Dragon. 

In the dimming light, it took her longer than she thought to get the sticker on the glass. She had to pull out her bus pass and carefully score over the top to keep the air bubbles out. By the time she was done, her anxiety had almost smoothed over too. Faye grabbed her things and let herself out to examine her handiwork from the other side of the door. The tiger looked out at her with fierce eyes. 

Faye’s years of gambling had ingrained in her an undeniable superstitious streak, and maybe it was this that made her believe it, or maybe it was the now familiar rush of the street around her: the same billowing cloud of fresh sheet smell from the laundromat next door; the same rumble of train wheels over sleepers on the viaduct overhead; the same kiosk owner waving to her as he closed up his awnings for the day.  _ It means you’re safe.  _

Faye raised her hand back at the kiosk owner, then pressed the remote to bring the store’s grate down over the window. As an afterthought before she left, she called over, ‘Have a good one!’ She still didn’t know the man’s name, but she would ask it some time. 

She noticed on the walk to her bus stop that the tigers were in other shop fronts. She counted them up in her head like talismans. Surely they had not just sprung up since this morning; she must just not have noticed. Things seemed to keep changing in this incremental way lately, coming in like the dusk. 

Like Spike’s wounds beginning to heal over. Like him starting to laugh at his TV shows again, or tell Jet his bonsai weren’t looking bad, or talk about what he would order when they had real money and he could go to his favourite ramen place again. Like the other night, him asking her to drive him and them almost having a real conversation. 

Faye boarded the bus, finding her usual spot at the back, and leaned her head against the window. She could have let it happen, the conversation, only she’d remembered whose car they were in. In her experience, Spike was only open with her when Julia’s memory seemed to be compelling him in some way; she didn’t want it like that. She shouldn’t let herself hope it was different this time.

She watched the other people filtering on and off the bus, wondering what homes they were going to, where they’d hang their coats and who might be there to greet them when they did. This wasn’t new to her; for as long as she’d been Faye Valentine she had been secreting away the clues to that kind of life, even as she’d tied herself in knots avoiding it. She had never thought that she’d have permission to be one of those people, leading her own life amongst them; heading back from a place where people said  _ good job _ , to another kind of place where people were expecting her, and made food for her, and might even ask about her day. That felt all new. 

It felt fragile too, as if one foot wrong could stop it all being true. She’d found herself relying on old good-luck rituals, like seeing if she could hold her breath as the bus traveled between the two big intersections, or finding the specific seat in the second-from-last row, or counting things to check if they divided into even numbers. 

These were the thoughts of a mad woman, she knew. But the idea of stopping felt too much like relinquishing whatever small and hard-won goodness she had to the whims of fortune, which had never favoured her. Look what had happened today: she had let her guard down, and the Dragons had almost come rushing back in. Or what about in the hospital? She knew she hadn’t actually warded death away from Spike with the power of thought - but if she had sat back and let chance have its way? What then? 

By the time Faye reached the marina, the moon was out: at least, one of the two you could make out from Mars. There was another, further away and more like a star, but the one that reflected on the water was just like a smaller version of Earth’s moon. It seemed to come and go in the sky much faster, so she always looked out for it especially.  _ Love you to the moon and back _ , her mother had sometimes told her. Faye thought, even this moon?

As she approached the ship she saw a lanky figure silhouetted against the grainy dark, sitting out on the deck with the pinpoint glow of a cigarette floating around them. She couldn’t help it; her walking sped up. 

‘Nice evening,’ said Spike by way of greeting as she came up the gangway. ‘Big sunset.’

‘Oh. Not where I was in town. I missed it.’ Did she sound out of breath as she approached?

‘Too bad. Haven’t seen a red like that in a long while. Always good for clearing your head, aren’t they?’ 

Faye had known Spike to be sentimental about things like sunsets with Jet, but never to bring her into it. She could have said something sentimental herself, about the moon perhaps, but it seemed a rhetorical question. 

‘So that old town of mine. What’s it like out there these days?’ 

Faye shrugged. ‘It’s not like I see much of it. I go to work, I come back.’ As if she had never thought about his history there, or passed any of that commute looking down every street going by for a sign that maybe Spike Spiegel could have grown up on this one, or this one, or this one.

‘Tell me something about it, though,’ Spike coaxed. ‘Any news of the outside world. I’d like to hear it.’ He saw her shift her bag to the other shoulder. ‘But I’m keeping you.’

‘It’s okay. Uh, there’s like four big construction sites in midtown now?’ 

Spike nodded. ‘Used to be whole big sections were just empty lots. Kids would hang around there all day. No stopping the march of progress in the end though.’ 

He took a slow drag. Faye let herself watch the lazy movement of his hand to his mouth far longer than she should have, hedonistically long. She might never have seen that gesture again. The anecdote she also filed away, to be decoded later along with everything else he had half-told her about his past. 

‘Hey,’ she said because the lead, however far down it was buried, had emboldened her. ‘We could go for another drive later.’ Stupid - as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wished she could have crumpled them into a ball and hurled them overboard. ‘I mean, if you’re really that starved for entertainment.’

Spike’s eyebrows lifted ever so slightly. ‘I’m fine for sympathy today, thanks. Just doing some humble stargazing here. But if you’re offering to take me on a city lights tour...’ 

‘Not go into town, or anywhere busy, obviously. But the next best thing? Just drive around wherever?’ 

Spike tipped his ash into the water, then leaned back in his chair and surveyed her with a curious look in his eye. 

‘Yeah. I suppose wherever would be the next best thing.’

‘But this time after I eat though, k?’ 

‘Okay. Deal.’ Spike smiled. 

Faye turned to head inside and noticed that he did not resume his stargazing, moving instead to follow her. Probably it was nothing, she thought, but he had been out here at the same time she always came back. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The protest sticker here was inspired a grassroots business coalition in Sicily called the Addiopizzo, who sign a pledge not to pay 'pizzo' extortion money to the Mafia. I learned this from the Sicily episode of Anthony Bourdain's 'Parts Unknown'.


	9. Chapter 9

This time Faye took them north, to the uppermost edge of the plateau where the lights of Tharsis could be seen gently curving away from them. Spike thought about how many millennia it had taken for the Mars terrain to form this way, versus a whole city hastily thrown up in under three decades. He had heard once that if the entire history of the universe was your arm’s length, mankind had only been around as long as your fingernail - or something trite like that. 

‘Can we stop here a while?’ Spike said, when they approached a pull-off with a view over the northern district. 

‘Yet more gazing at the distance?’ Faye said, switching on the indicator. ‘You’re not about to have a mystical experience, are you? And if so could it be no longer than ten minutes please?’ 

‘It’s been a while since I saw Tharsis from up here,’ was all he said. He did seem to be drawn to views more than usual these days, like maybe if he stared into them long enough something would happen.

Faye gave an unconvincing huff as she pulled them to a stop, and switched the engine off. He listened to the wind around them, watched it stir the tops of the trees. Faye could pretend all she liked that she wasn’t impressed by the mysteries of the universe, but he could tell she was listening and watching too. 

‘Is it cool if I take my shoes off?’ she said, breaking the quiet.

‘Huh?’ Spike was taken aback she’d ask such a thing. Faye never had the slightest trouble making herself comfortable without asking. She did things like leave underwear drying over vents in the corridor, swig from cartons before putting them right back in the fridge, and play solitaire with his deck of cards without bothering to put them back in the pack. She did not ever ask if anyone minded things like her taking her shoes off. 

‘My feet are killing me. They  _ are _ clean, before you insinuate anything,’ she added. ‘I showered before dinner.’ Spike made a shrugging  _ go ahead  _ gesture. Faye slid down a little in her seat and alternately used one foot to push the shoe off the other, then stretched out more and flexed them both in relief. He saw that in the process, her newly dried hair became slightly mussed with static against the seat upholstery. It always took him by surprise, the things that felt most intimate to see in a person when you lived alongside them every day. 

‘I never get used to that,’ Faye said, straightening up again and smoothing her hair back. He could smell her shampoo as she did so. ‘Standing up all day.’ 

‘Standing still,’ Spike suggested, pointedly.

‘I wish.’ Faye rolled her eyes. ‘The boss has got me hauling stuff around the whole time. He’s like, obsessed that we have to rotate the stock constantly.’ She stifled a yawn with the back of her hand.

‘Hey, you really didn’t have to do this, you know,’ said Spike. ‘If you’ve had a long day.’ He did not mean it sarcastically for once. He had been pleasantly surprised by the offer.

She kept her hand by her mouth. ‘Who says it’s a favor? It’s just nice to do something mindless for a while,’ she said lightly. Trying hard as ever to disassociate herself from the notion of caring, yet she’d used the word  _ nice _ . 

They lapsed into a momentary silence. Faye looked dead ahead out of the windshield. Then all at once she said, ‘That thing about the kids hanging around Tharsis. That was you, right?’ 

Spike followed her gaze and said, ‘Let’s just say I never saw the inside of a school much.’ He wondered how much she’d pieced together already, and why it didn’t feel strange to tell her this part now.

‘Huh.’ She paused. ‘Well, that checks out, doesn’t it,’ she added, perhaps for the sake of sarcasm continuity, but it sounded more like affection to him. She pulled her feet up onto the seat and crossed them languorously under her. There was an adolescent quality to it that he suddenly placed as familiar to him from her video tape; simultaneously he recognised it as the way she usually preferred to sit when she relaxed on the  _ Bebop _ . That was another strange side effect of learning things about someone. That you could remember them doing the same when a stranger to you and realise,  _ oh, that was you all along _ . 

‘Can I ask - I mean, what were you like in school?’ He hadn’t planned on asking, but there it was. 

‘Oh.’ Her breath hitched a little and she rubbed her thumb under the band of her sock. ‘I guess - really? You really want to know?’

‘Sorry. It’s not - ‘

‘No, um. I just never… well, I’m not sure you’d believe me, anyway.’ 

‘Try me.’

She smiled then. ‘I was a model student, actually. I hardly ever got in trouble. Believe that?’

‘Weirdly, yeah. I can see you being that annoying,’ Spike teased, hoping this too sounded affectionate, because he didn’t want the conversation to end. It was of the kind he’d shared more often with her lately, that gave him the feeling of gradually tuning in from a sea of static white noise to the bright sound of a radio station.

‘I was kind of a suck-up,’ she admitted. ‘My grades were nothing special, but I was in all these clubs and stuff. I really wanted everyone to like me.’ 

‘I’m sure they did,’ Spike said seriously. ‘You seemed like a sweet kid.’ The first acknowledgement he’d given that he’d watched that tape, even though they both very well knew he had. 

She gave a thin, sad smile. ‘How things change, huh?’

He didn’t know how to answer that. ‘Don’t you… I mean, isn’t it kind of strange, with your job? Seeing old Earth stuff?’

‘You mean do I spend my breaks crying my eyes out over some musty antiques?’ She shrugged. ‘It’s just things. That’s what we’d always say when something got broken in the house. Ha, is that a spoiled thing to say? That we could just replace it?’ 

‘Kinda, yeah,’ he smiled. ‘It was only hand-me-downs for me.’ 

‘ Maybe that’s what I like about it,’ Faye said thoughtfully. ‘These things get passed on, they get another life. Ugh, that came out corny.’ 

‘Sure what you like being passed on isn’t just the money?’ Spike offered.

Faye gave an exhale of amusement. ‘Yeah, okay, that’s true. I’ll be as corny as you like for a cash incentive. It’s all about selling the story to them, anyway.’ Something passed over her face. ‘Oh, I meant to say earlier. There is something else new. We have this sign up in the door, and so do a lot of other places round us now, that’s - well it’s like a protest I guess, against the Dragons?’ She mumbled it hurriedly, tucking her hair behind her ear. 

‘Against the Dragons,’ Spike repeated stupidly. ‘What, are people looking to get shot?’ 

‘That’s what I thought. Asking for trouble. But I guess nobody’s even been threatened about it, or they wouldn’t do it. It’s like a pride thing to have this sign up now. Anyway, just thought you should know you were right. It seems like they’re pretty much done.’

‘So. Things really are changing.’ Spike looked back down over the fuzz of lights below. It was not that he was surprised to have it confirmed - hadn’t ending their reign always been the object? It seemed so removed from him now, the very last domino in a line. Absentmindedly he touched his chest, feeling for the pain. ‘Never thought they would change so fast, though.’ 

Faye nodded. ‘So what, you think Tharsis will go fully gentrified?’

‘I think that’s a way off yet. I mean, there have always been the wealthy districts, but it’s still basically a total shithole, right? No rich without poor?’

‘For sure,’ Faye agreed. ‘But there’s a certain rich type, it’s a status symbol for them living in a shithole. I’ve seen plenty of them in the store.’ She snorted. ‘I think my boss is probably one of them too. He loves to say he got there first.’ 

‘Well how about that.’ 

Some nameless new feeling, huge and strange, was unfolding around him.

Faye moved her eyes to his face, and for a second it was like she could see right inside of him. ‘Off the record? I think it’s normal if you feel weird about it.’ 

‘I don’t feel weird.’

‘Ok. But if you did. That wouldn’t be - surprising, or anything.’ Faye gently touched his arm in a way that might have been awkward but wasn’t at all. It seemed so easy, being with her here. ‘After all the shit that went down.’ She withdrew her hand and he immediately missed its small warmth.

‘Yeah. You could say that.’ She had gotten mixed up in the Dragons too, because of him. And she’d still brought him Julia’s message. Of course he had thought about that. ‘Thanks. And same, if you ever feel weird...’ 

‘Uh-huh - off the record,’ she repeated, with a wry smile. She yawned again and suddenly Spike felt how heavy and tired he was too. 

He said, ‘You better get us back without falling asleep at the wheel.’ 

But on the drive back, it was him who drifted away, and Faye who had to prod him awake. Back on the ship it was the first night in a long time his sleep was unbroken and without dreams. 


	10. Chapter 10

It became what they did, not every night but often enough that by the time Spike was well enough to feasibly have gone further than a few hundred yards from the ship on his own, the question did not come up of whether they would continue. Most trips they would say nothing of any consequence to each other, but those nights Spike would find he would still sleep better than if they didn’t go out at all. 

He was grateful to be able to talk about bullshit, anyway, rather than think about the fact that his wounds were well on their way to scarring over and he could now get around most places without the wheelchair and at some point they’d all have to talk about what happened next. 

He and Faye covered a lot of good bullshit ground talking about TV: laughing about the particular annoying ad jingle that would always make Jet go crazy when it came on; arguing about which sports were interesting to see televised or not; speculating on whatever had happened to Punch and Judy after  _ Big Shot _ ’s cancellation. (It felt a little less like bullshit the time that Faye roughly presented him with a set of tapes of Bruce Lee’s back catalogue, though she’d insisted they’d only been sitting around forgotten about in the back of the store).

Other times, the realer things would float by in pieces. Once he’d ventured to ask Faye if she wasn’t worried about staying working in one place too long. She’d looked away and said, 

‘I gave my real name, you know. When I started. It’s printed on my contract. The cops never knew it, nobody did. They’ll never find me that way. Isn’t that the perfect alibi?’

Spike had somehow forgotten she had a name other than Faye Valentine. ‘Sure,’ he’d said. ‘I guess that’s… smart. But you could still be recognised.’

‘I know, but...’ She’d gone very quiet. ‘Sometimes I think if I stay still long enough, I’ll get closer to them.’

He hadn’t needed to ask to know she meant her family.

‘Not by going back to Earth?’ 

‘I can’t explain it.’ 

Spike thought he sort of understood, that right now she’d be doing whatever she felt she needed to do on Mars to keep manifesting the whole other planet she was living on inside her head. She’d probably need to be on that planet a while. When Julia had first left him, there’d been a long time where he’d connected everything to her, like if he could just keep thinking about her hard enough whatever he did then he’d still be contained in her orbit even if he never saw her again. 

Now whenever the thought of Julia came up he’d still push it angrily away. He knew that was not something he could keep up long-term either, but he was not ready to know what would happen once he pulled on that thread again. 

In the meantime he could almost pretend that things on the  _ Bebop _ were as before, which these days did not seem like such a bad thing. There were times when they were all in the common area that he could have sworn none of it had ever happened and that six extra feet might at any moment come padding in from the other room. It was on an evening like that, when they were playing quick-fire card games, that Jet produced a bottle of bourbon he sheepishly admitted he’d been keeping stashed behind the bonsai the whole time, letting Spike and Faye go around believing the last drink on the ship had dried up months ago (‘Been saving it for an occasion or something, but no time like the present, hey?’). 

It must have been longer than he’d thought since he last drank because at only a handful of measures down, the liquor had already done such a number on Spike that he could not have reliably counted to it were that number higher than two digits. He also couldn’t tell what effect it was having on his crewmates, whether they had become shinier versions of themselves because they were drunk too, or if it just seemed that way because he was drunk and even the furniture seemed perfectly enchanting to him right then.

‘You know what’d really make us rich?’ he said. ‘Bottle this stuff. It’s so good, people will pay a fortune for it. Why have we never thought of this before?’ 

‘You’re a genius, Spike,’ Faye said, lowering herself onto the floor and slouching back against the couch. 

‘I think someone already had the idea of putting it in a bottle.’ Jet held it out and Spike leant forward unsteadily, holding out his bad arm by mistake, to have his glass topped up. 

‘Well then we should make our own. In the bathtub. Or not even bother, just put a different label on this stuff.’ He retrieved the glass as normally as he could muster and slid down to join Faye on the floor. 

‘You’re full of good ideas tonight,’ she said brightly. ‘A bit of light intellectual property infringement, why not?’ Their bodies were angled in such a way that they were almost leaning against each other and he could feel how warm she was; smell a faint and pleasantly sour tang on her skin. 

‘Trust you to have such high words for theft,’ Spike retorted into his glass. He wondered if it looked as obvious as it felt how aware of her he was. When she pulled her hair up off her neck, did she know what that did to him? He really hoped that Jet at least was oblivious to whatever was happening. 

‘Wouldn’t be the worst thing any of us have done,’ Jet said. If he had noticed anything he was being tactful about it. It was his fault anyway, for bringing booze into it. Wasn’t Jet supposed to be the judicious one? Spike closed his eyes for half a second, then peeled them open again, his eyelids heavy. 

‘I kind of like the bathtub idea,’ mused Faye. 

‘Nuh uh. There have been too many incidents of ingesting strange substances on this ship already,’ said Jet. Spike smiled in reminiscence and let his head fall back against the cushions. 

‘Don’t remind me of any of those,’ said Faye. ‘Jet? What?’

Spike lifted his head again. Jet was holding one finger up, his head cocked to one side. ‘You hear that?’ he asked. ‘I think it’s the bridge.’

They all fell silent. At first Spike could hear nothing but the thrum of the fan above them, but then he thought he heard it too. An intermittent chirrup coming from the bridge that sounded an awful lot like the long-distance comms system being activated. 

Jet was already halfway out the door. Spike looked at Faye and she shrugged, but began to clamber to her feet as well. 

‘Hang on. Give me a second here,’ he said, not wanting to be left behind, though he wasn’t quite sure why they all needed to go. It was probably nothing, just Doohan checking in or something. He tried to pull himself up using the edge of the couch. Faye held out her hand and he took it gratefully with his good arm, wincing a little in pain as he rose to standing, but the whiskey did a good job of numbing it. 

‘Do you think - ?’ he said, and Faye released his hand.

‘Jet almost jumps out of his skin every time that thing goes off,’ she said. ‘It’s never anything.’ But they both made their way quickly after him.

Jet was sat at the comms station, muttering at the display screen which was illuminating his face with lines of wavering static. ‘Damn thing,’ he said to apparently nobody in particular, hitting the edge with the flat of his hand. 

‘What does that say?’ Faye asked, pointing at a barely legible line of text flickering at the bottom.

‘Unidentified caller ID,’ said Jet, just as the static juddered to a stop and the screen turned a grainy black. ‘Shit, what is that? Is it broken? I’ve never seen it do that before.’

‘Look.’ Spike pointed and they saw the black mass seemed to be moving, with slits of light coming into view either side. There was a strange crackling, heaving sound and the screen began misting over. 

‘It’s breathing,’ said Faye. Spike swayed a little on the spot, grappling with the absurdity of that statement, but then he saw that she was right, because the dark mass receded and materialised into a smaller black shape that they all recognised. It was the tip of a dog’s snout. 

‘Silly Ein!’ came a sing-song voice over the top of the boisterous snuffling sound. ‘It’s all wet!’ The view swung upwards in a blur, then went momentarily dark again. There was more crackling, then the small moon of Ed’s face finally swam into view. ‘Ed’s cleaned it for you now. Greetings, greetings!’

‘Ed? Is that you? Where are you?’ Jet was leaning forward. ‘I can’t see you very well.’ Faye had gone to lean over Jet’s shoulder, but Spike glanced around for somewhere to sit and settled on the edge of the table. He couldn’t seem to stand up straight.

Ed said, ‘My very  _ exciting _ magic carpet just sailed under nine palace elephants.’

‘What is she talking about?’ Spike’s head was swimming. ‘What elephants?’ 

‘I can’t - what do you mean?’ Jet half shouted. ‘I said where are you?’

‘Guess again!’ sang Ed, thrusting the camera below her chin so she was looking down at them omnipotently. 

‘Earth,’ said Faye. ‘I think she means Earth. My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants. It’s the solar system. Isn’t it?’

This still didn’t seem to make sense to Spike. 

‘We have a winner!’ beamed Ed. ‘Mars Venus  _ Earth _ Mercury Ceres Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto Eris,’ she added all in one breath. ‘Don’t forget the dwarf planets! Or they’ll be sad and lonely.’

‘So you’re still on Earth. But where?’ prodded Jet. ‘Is your father with you? Did you find him?’

Ed must have put the camera down on something steady because it abruptly stopped shaking. She backed into full view and Spike saw a dull rocky orange landscape he recognised as the last place they’d last seen her. ‘Father-person was found,’ she confirmed, squatting to put her hand on Ein’s head. 

‘But is he with you?’

Ein gave a sharp bark. ‘Father-person had to go to see a dog,’ said Ed, looking at Ein like she was translating him. ‘Not this dog. Another one.’

Spike noticed Faye and Jet exchange a look. 

‘He told you that?’ Faye asked. ‘He said he had to go and see about a dog? When was this?’

‘Has he been gone a short time or a long time?’ added Jet.

Ein barked again. 

‘Ein thinks long time. Dogs don’t know time, silly. Ein thinks long time is when Ed hides and he seeks.’ 

‘Oh, brother,’ Jet muttered under his breath. ‘Ed, can you still hear me? So you’re on your own?’

She began hopping from one foot to the other. ‘Father-person’s coming back. Father-person said so.’

‘Didn’t Father-person say that before,’ Faye said flatly, also under her breath.

‘But he’s not back yet,’ prompted Jet. 

‘She’s fine,’ Spike interjected. ‘Aren’t you, Ed? You can take care of yourself. And you have Ein.’ He caught Faye’s eye and she pursed her lips. 

‘Ein und zwei,’ said Ed, rubbing Ein’s flank. ‘One and two makes me and you.’ 

Ein began to bark incessantly. Jet looked around at Faye and Spike, his face unreadable, though it didn’t take a genius to guess what he was thinking.

Spike stood up too fast and the light from the screen surged in front of his eyes. ‘So that’s why you’re calling? To tell us you’re okay? That’s good, Ed.’ He tapped the side of the screen twice. ‘We’re all glad to see it.’ Except he wasn’t really looking. The light was actually making him feel nauseous.

‘Listen, listen!’ Ed said brightly over the sound of Ein’s barking, and stroking his ears absentmindedly. ‘Everything okay, okay?’ Spike wasn’t sure if she was talking to them or the dog, but he looked at the others and shrugged. Ed bounded back over to the camera. 

‘Aaaand mission transmission, accomplished!’ she shouted. ‘Say bye-bye, Ein!’ 

‘Now just hang on!’ cut in Jet. ‘I haven’t done asking yet, Ed. Are you - ’

But Ed was already singing some kind of goodbye song and Ein was howling discordantly over the top of it, the cacophony drowning out the rest of Jet’s question. It sounded awful and Spike put his hands up to his head. ‘For crying out loud.’

As Ed leapt towards it the camera juddered, then went suddenly blank. Just like that she and Ein were gone again and Jet was staring into an empty screen.

‘Well,’ said Spike, breaking the silence that followed. ‘Jet, you were right. Tonight was an occasion after all.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants' was invented by a real child, a 10-year-old named Maryn Smith, in a 2007 competition sponsored by National Geographic to coin a new planetary mnemonic incoporating the known dwarf planets.


	11. Chapter 11

‘He’s an idiot,’ said Faye, when Spike had loped off back to his room. She dug the nail of her forefinger sharply into her thumb cuticle and tried not to look at Jet. She had work tomorrow. She should never have agreed to drinking anything in the first place, and now this had happened. It was the trouble with sticking around. That uninvited visitor called consequence would always know where to find you.

‘It’s his way,’ said Jet simply. ‘He’s just being Spike.’

‘Well, he shouldn’t be him. He could at least pretend to care.’ The words didn’t sound right even to her. She thought of the Spike who listened to her on their trips, how it made the inside of her head quiet. How could things be that simple then but still be like this the rest of the time? 

‘Seeing as you do such a great job of that yourself, huh?’ said Jet. He stood up and took the few short paces to the other end of the bridge. 

‘Look, we can all agree how dysfunctional everyone on this ship is, and blah blah blah,’ countered Faye. ‘I wasn’t trying to start a competition.’ She was glad to hear Jet give a small breathy laugh and realised how tipsy she must be to be talking out loud about emotions with him, even in a roundabout way. ‘But speaking of, that was definitely a cry for help, right?’ She waved her hand at the empty screen. 

‘I don’t know.’ Jet gave a shrug that looked more like a grimace. ‘Maybe Spike is right. She was just saying hi. They looked fine.’

‘Well, I don’t speak Ed. That could be true.’

‘You knew when she meant Earth.’ Jet met her eye and Faye quickly looked up to the ceiling. 

‘It’s a known thing. I’d just heard it before. That’s besides the point.’

‘Okay.’ Jet sighed. ‘I don’t know what we’d do, anyway. I don’t know how she got that call to us but it was untraceable. Can’t call them back. Just have to wait and see.’

‘If Spike didn’t scare her off.’ This time her own words generated a real flash of indignance at Spike that lit up her already whiskey-inflamed insides. 

‘It’s always Spike’s fault with you, isn’t it?’

That made it worse. ‘Oh, here we go. Don’t you ever get mad at him? I mean, for more than just complaining about your food or whatever? Like really, actually mad?’ She was riling herself up now, the words sloshing dangerously around like a petrol spill.

Jet frowned. ‘You really want to get into this? ‘Cause I’m ready to talk about what makes me mad whenever you are. Been waiting long enough for the both of you to catch up.’

‘Ooh, I’m at fault too, am I? The person who’s been going out to work every day to make sure we don’t all starve?’ 

‘C’mon. You know that hasn’t gone unnoticed. And I’m sure it’s really great for you, Faye. Just like it’s great for you and Spike to go off on your little parade every damn night.’

‘Okay, why are you making me out to be some kind of neglectful husband? Nobody’s forcing you to stay on the ship all day. This isn’t  _ Desperate Housewives _ .’ Faye almost made herself laugh, an absurd feeling when she was still angry, but she saw that Jet remained deadly serious. 

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I’m fine on my own, thanks. I don’t want to get in the way of whatever love-hate thing it is you two have going on. That’s your affair. Besides, someone does need to stay here actually. Now we know she might call again.’

That extinguished the light on her fuse almost instantly. So much so that she didn’t even have the energy to dismiss the first statement. ‘Well, we know where to find her,’ she said, quieter. 

‘Don’t say that like it’s simple.’ Jet paced back across the room and sat down heavily at the comms desk. 

‘Maybe it is simple.’

Jet spun in the chair and gestured all around him. ‘You think I can just make this thing go with the power of love and wishes or something?’ 

‘Don’t be obtuse. I just mean that Spike isn’t going to be in recovery forever.’

‘And then what, everything goes back to like it was before? Is that really what you want? To go back to hunting bounties again?’

She said nothing.

‘Is that what you want for Spike?’ he added.

Instead of anger, Faye felt very tired suddenly, like if she lay down she would go to sleep right there on the hard metal floor. 

‘I didn’t say anything about me. And Spike can do whatever he wants.’

‘So you’re saying you’d stay here.’

‘Wouldn’t want to tie you down. One less mouth for you to feed,’ she said bitterly. 

‘Now you’re being obtuse. I never said that.’ Jet put one hand up to his temple and rubbed it wearily. ‘For god’s sake. I never should have got that bottle out, should I?’

Faye laughed, because she thought she might cry otherwise. ‘Did you think it would help us all get along?’ she said, trying to sound arch. Jet snorted.

‘It’s not Spike you should be mad at, anyway,’ she added. ‘It was me who gave Ed the idea to leave.’ She hadn’t meant to say it but it tumbled out like it had been waiting inside her for a long time. It sounded pathetic and she wanted Jet to hate her for it. 

‘What do you mean?’

‘I told her… it was the night my memory came back. I said something to her about finding where you belonged.’ Her face smarted. ‘It was stupid, she just looked so happy when we saw her dad and I thought I was giving her advice. I don’t know.’ 

‘Faye.’ Jet was staring at her. ‘What are you - it’s not your fault if her dad is like that.’ 

‘No, but I shouldn’t have...‘ She made a helpless shape with her hands.

‘Shouldn’t have what? Said something sincere, you mean? Tried to connect like a human being?’ He shook his head. ‘You really weren’t kidding about the dysfunctional thing, were you. Look, we’ll figure something out, somehow. But why don’t you get some sleep, Faye. There’s no point talking about it at this hour.’

Faye really did feel like crying then, at how long it had been since someone last told her to get some sleep. 

‘What about you?’

‘I think I’ll stay here a bit longer.’ 

Faye nodded, and left him sitting there at his watch. 

All the time while she was getting herself ready for bed, when she was cleaning her teeth and washing her face and drinking her glass of water and setting her alarm, she thought about it: the way Jet had said  _ and then what, everything goes back to like it was before? _ She could feel it again, and stronger than ever. That sensation like her life was light bending on its way to a black hole. She would keep falling and falling towards the centre of it until she disappeared. 

This time she didn’t use any of her usual rituals. She didn’t think about Spike or Jet or Ed or Ein and she didn’t think about her family. She forced them all out with the singular solid line of thought about how she would get to the store the next day. The walk from the marina to the stop, the wait for the bus in the chill morning air. Tapping in her pass, finding her seat, watching all fifteen stops rattle past as the buildings and the throngs of people got denser. Stepping out onto the sidewalk and the walk to the store (maybe stopping if she had time to get a coffee from the kiosk, she’d almost certainly have a terrible hangover). Finding the keys in her bag and opening up for the day. Signing in to the electronic till and settling in to greet the first customers. 

She played it all in minute detail, over and over until she finally drifted away into sleep.


	12. Chapter 12

Spike awoke before dawn.

In fact it wasn’t really waking up, because his sleep had been light and fitful. He had slipped in and out of half-consciousness every few hours, his own brain contents rattling away like a trapped swarm of insects - too fast for him to catch a glimpse of but driving him higher and higher into a crazed state of immense urgency. His head still thrummed with residual energy as he opened his eyes and realised he would not get back to sleep this time, that he was still drunk. 

Spike sat up slowly. Even that movement was regretful. He felt like he’d run a whole marathon on the spot and also been run over. He was damp with sweat.

He focused for a while on the liminal early-morning sounds of the _Bebop_. The pipes were quietly expanding and contracting. The hum of the generator came from somewhere far-off in the ship’s bowels, but he seemed to feel it in his own bloodstream. The sounds were familiar but strange all at once, lacking in texture. Different from when they were traveling in space. 

They weren’t traveling in space. They weren’t traveling towards anything. Last night came back to him as he saw Ed dancing on the spot, the spot she hadn’t moved from the whole time but which they couldn’t get to anyway. They were all here instead. Stranded.

Because of him.

Spike realised he was going to throw up. He staggered out of bed and through to the bathroom, hoping nobody would hear as the acrid contents heaved out of him and into the toilet bowl with an abject liquid sound. At least it came out of him easily and he didn’t have to retch too many times. His chest might not have been able to take that. 

He had thought it might make him feel better but apart from lessening his nausea, there was little difference. He still felt swollen and heavy. 

Spike put his mouth under the tap, swilling and spitting water, then took more mouthfuls and gulped them down. 

His body. His treacherously human body. Keeping him alive even when in his mind he had been as good as dead. It had been lying in wait the whole time for his mind to fully catch up and now he knew it finally had.

It didn’t hit him like a train. The impact of the realisation came quietly. 

_You are here. You are here, you are here, you are here._

He shut the toilet seat and sat down. 

_You are alive._

_You are alive and Julia is dead._

_Julia is dead, Julia is dead, Julia is dead._

Of course he had known that the whole time, intellectually. But it had seemed too impossible to hold those two truths in his body at once, that he was alive and she was dead. That it was his fault. It was all his fault. It didn’t belong to Julia, or Faye or Jet, or even Vicious. Definitely not to the Universe. The fault belonged to him. 

And for some reason it was a relief to finally feel the guilt, to be able to hold it against him and keep it there for a while, as his and his alone. 

Spike sat for a long time, watching the floor until it stopped spinning under him. He listened to the sound of his own breathing, of how it filled the room. He watched how even the smallest of his movements made shadows on the metal. He felt almost delirious at how each moment could be so different from the last and that he should be there to experience each of them. It was the worst he had ever felt in his life and the preposterous thing about it was how glad it made him to have it. 

His life. His life, and the long string of mistakes that had made it. 

He realised that he was actually crying and it was so easy, like pushing on a door and slipping through it when the whole time he had been pulling and pulling away. 

When he finally felt flushed out and like he could stand up without vomiting again, Spike got in the shower and ran the water hot. He stayed in it until his skin was pink and raw. He went to fetch a clean change of clothes and headed to the galley, where he drank three glasses of water. Then he stood in front of the fridge with the door wide open and ate a whole thing of the bell peppers and beef that Jet had carefully portioned out the day before. When he shut the door he wrote down the ingredients with ‘Spike: to buy’ on the special magnetic blackboard that only Jet ever used. He paused to sit down for a moment again because his shoulder was paining him, then made his way out onto the _Bebop_ deck. 

The sun was only just coming up, and the air was chill and misty. It was pleasant to breathe it in, fill his head with it. Out across the water, a flock of gulls lifted off and called out to each other. The sound reminded him of coming down to the marina as a boy. Him and the other kids chasing those birds around, laughing maniacally and sincerely believing they might one day be able to catch one, even though they never did.

Spike took a shaky few steps down the gangway, then found his centre of balance and set off on a slow, long arc around the marina. The fishing ships had already set out hours ago and he could make out a cluster of them on the horizon. Some of them were even heading back in already, and a group of men were directing a reversing van that had come to collect the fish for market. Soon the air would be full of their stench, but for now it was fresh and clean. 

Spike didn’t feel like smoking, because he thought it would make him sick again. He kept his hands deep in his pockets and focused on breathing in and out, willing himself to sober up. He thought about making himself a prairie oyster when he got back but he wasn’t sure they had any hot sauce and the thought of raw egg yolk on its own was too foul just then, even for him. Only the other day Faye had accused him of having no disgust threshold when it came to food and he had leveled the same thing at her; they’d taken it in turns listing the most disgusting things they could think of the other one having eaten. Had raw egg been on the list? He thought back on how much they had both laughed, Faye so much that by the end she could barely speak. It hadn’t even been that funny but it had been his first proper laugh in a long time. Jet had come in from the other room to ask them what the hell was going on.

When he had been out for almost an hour, Spike felt ready to go back inside. He must have missed Faye leaving because her coat and bag weren’t on the rack. He felt a tug at seeing them gone. 

He went back to the galley and looked in the fridge again. Sure enough, he could see they still had a carton of eggs but in the cupboard above, no hot sauce. Spike thought for a minute, then fetched a frying pan, and the last slices of bread and the last smear of precious butter. He put the butter and the eggs in the pan and the bread in the toaster.

The smell must have woken Jet because he came blearily into the common area while Spike was finishing up. ‘What’s that?’ he called over, his voice hoarse.

‘A fried egg sandwich,’ said Spike, coming through with the plate in one hand and napkins in the other. He put the sandwich down in front of Jet, who had slumped onto the couch. He looked terrible, like he hadn’t had any sleep either. 

‘Not for me?’

‘Yes for you.’

‘Aren’t you starving?’

‘I ate already,’ said Spike. ‘Sorry about that, by the way. I owe you for a few groceries.’

Jet picked up the sandwich and tutted as the grease ran down his hand. Spike handed him a napkin and Jet eyed him warily.

‘And where are you going to get the money for that? We need to talk about this, Spike. I know that you’re almost healed but I’ve been thinking about the whole bounty-hunting thing...’ He trailed off, rubbing with the napkin.

Spike gestured at the sandwich. 

‘Go on,’ he prompted. ‘You eat. I’ll talk.’

‘But Spike -’

‘No. I’ve been thinking too.’

And Spike began to talk. 


	13. Chapter 13

It was early evening by the time Spike thought the alcohol had left his bloodstream enough. 

He still didn’t tell Jet that he was going to do it. There was no rational reason why he shouldn’t wait anyway. But he’d done enough sitting around waiting. Spike lowered himself into the driver’s seat for the first time in what felt a very long time, and started the car’s engine. The steering wheel thrummed in his hands. He had missed that feeling. 

Jet would know, of course, as soon as he pressed the switch for the hangar doors to open and they began to bleat their sirens in compliance. He drove through and across onto the landing strip as fast as he could, and by the time he saw Jet stick his head around the door, he was already far enough away that Spike couldn’t see his expression. It would just have to be another thing on the whole long list of things he still owed Jet apologies for. 

He had not driven on the main roads of Tharsis in forever. Annie’s place had been in the outskirts, in a district that was mostly warehouses and empty roads. He had forgotten how bad the traffic could be when you tried to get to the centre of town. It was not even rush hour yet but there was already a ton of congestion. He balked every time he heard another horn go, not used to so many sounds at once. Where were all these people going? It seemed beyond imagining.

He wasn’t even sure he knew exactly where he was going, although he had the address and a vague idea in his head of where on the grid system it would be. If he got lost for too long the whole thing would be pointless, he would just have to turn back around in shame. More than once he ended up in the wrong lane and had to pull an illegal maneuver, including one unfortunate time in front of a speed camera that flashed accusingly in his eyes. He only just managed to stop the car crashing altogether. 

Finally Spike rounded a block and saw a railway viaduct that looked familiar. He recognised some of the graffiti tags on it, but those could be found all over this district, it wasn’t just that. He had come to this specific street before. 

He looked for what could be the store and spotted it almost immediately, not just because it was the only one on the row with an actual wooden sign hanging from it like in a movie but because he now knew this place was the same reason he’d come here in the past. 

‘This is stupid,’ he’d said, ‘Look how they’re trying to seem olde-worlde with that sign.’

‘I know it’s a little pretentious,’ Julia had replied. ‘They cater to a particular sort of clientele. But I know this guy, he won’t swindle me. And he keeps the rougher diamonds in the back, for people who know to ask. We’re not looking to buy, anyway. Let’s just drop in and see.’

Spike had never even known that this type of place could exist in such a part of town, let alone that people like him were allowed to go in and ask to see. At least, not without pulling the Red Dragons threat like Vicious would have done, had antiques been remotely of interest to him (they weren’t - he’d have said that even cornering the small black market that existed would have been too cumbersome a business when you could get away with extorting the bigger broad-daylight markets. That was his philosophy and how he saw the syndicate’s future). If Spike did have an idea of what being sophisticated was, it was grand boxes in the Opera and the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu, like he and Vicious had always vowed would be them one day when they finally ascended to the top of the ranks.

But Julia had made him see Tharsis differently, as more than a swamp town where there was only one way to unstick yourself from the mulch. She was the sort of person who knew what to ask for, who people obliged because they wanted to and not because they feared for their safety. And she could point at entirely esoteric-looking items that Spike would have said were worthless and show him how remarkable it was that this piece of past should have ended up here in front of them against all odds. Things defy expectation all the time, if you know how to see it, she’d say. 

In the time since she’d died and he had lived, Spike had gotten himself more stuck than he’d ever been trying to understand how the inevitable had not come true, that he hadn't died taking Vicious down and rounded off the story as it should have been. But how Julia had gone on at him for thinking like that in the past. Life is so random. There is no inevitable except dying. Everything in between is just a dream and only you can make sense of it. Why else had he left the syndicate? How else could he have come to understand her leaving him? He had almost forgotten how to believe it. 

There could have been some grand reason that Faye had ended up working in this store, like a sign of something. But if that were true it would only be because he wanted it to be. He had visited it with Julia only once. It didn’t mean anything at all, except that Tharsis wasn’t really that big of a colony and that Faye was from Earth so she knew about antiques too and sometimes coincidences just happen like that. Sometimes you just so happen to show your last poker chip that so happens to look like another poker chip and you look a bit like a guy that another person so happens to be looking for and so they’ll see what they want to see and it all unravels from there, and none of that was ever in your control because life is one big casino where the House is rigged against you anyway. The only thing you can control is when to fold and when to go in. That or you cheat it right back.

Spike parked up in front of the store, even though there was a notice warning him not to between the hours of nine and seven, and walked to the door. At the sight of her through the glass his heart lifted. She had noticed him from behind the desk and was raising her arms like _what on Earth._ She still used that expression sometimes; part of her would always be from there. Faye had been dealt her own share of terrible hands. She had found ways to keep on living anyway.

‘You came here in that?’ she demanded loudly over the sound of the bell as he entered. Spike looked back through the door at the car and gave an exaggerated shrug. It was true it was pretty damn red. 

‘There’s a police station just round the block,’ she added, ‘Sure you didn’t mean to park up in front of there, save them the trouble?’ 

‘You mean you aren’t glad to see me?’ said Spike, glancing around at the floor-to-ceiling racks which were as he remembered, so full he could barely take in what anything was. There were even clothes and bags hanging from the ceiling. He imagined everything collapsing down on top of them. Buried alive in stuff. 

‘The whole point is you’re supposed to be _out_ of sight.’ She sounded pissed off. He wondered if she was hungover. She did look a little flushed, a little tired, but not like last night had really happened. Was she going to pretend it hadn’t?

Spike pushed aside a row of puffy skirts that were blocking his path and approached the desk. ‘That ship has surely sailed. It’s always been a risk going out in it. You’ve hardly been incognito yourself.’ 

‘Hm,’ was all Faye said to that. Her work getup for today was a high-necked dark green sweater, and jeans. She looked so good in them - like she’d put on some weight, he realised, and the sweater brought out the green in her eyes. The whole thing was a world away from that traffic-light outfit of hers, which was obviously ridiculous, but which he couldn’t help be fond of too. Spike pretended to look at the basket of business cards on the desk and wished she knew how much he had always liked her.

‘So are you here for any good reason, or did you just come to get me fired?’ Faye was looking right past him as if for customers.

‘Oh, getting you fired is a good enough reason for me,’ he said, because he couldn’t resist.

‘Well, lucky me that my boss isn’t around today. I’m actually in charge? So I’d leave if I were you, or I might give you something to do.’ She waited a beat, then added pointedly, ‘Look, despite what you may think, I do actually have work to do here. I’m sure whatever you want, it can wait. I’ll see you back home, k?’

Spike tried to think of how to say the next part, over the sound of his mind replaying how casually she’d said the word _home._

‘Actually, this is work-related. Will you come out here and take a look at something for me?’

Faye did look him dead in the eye then. ‘This sounds like a set-up.’

‘I swear.’ He held his hands up. ‘Faye. I am trying to be serious here.’

She still looked suspicious, but he had noticed that his saying her name always had some kind of softening effect on her. ‘Right. It better be quick though. I can’t leave things too long. I’m a responsible sort of person now, you know.’ 

‘Ha,’ deadpanned Spike, and gestured again for her to come outside. When she stopped to hover dubiously by the door, he made a joke of gently steering her by the shoulders to make her go faster. She pushed his hands off, but not straight away.

‘So you know’ ventured Spike, as he stopped them in front of the car, ‘how old stuff makes a lot of money?’

‘What are you talking about now?’ She glanced at him sideways. ‘The right kind of old stuff, sure. Do you even have a permit to park this here?’

Spike looked at her pointedly. ‘Would this car be the right kind?’

Faye stared at him.

‘It would be worth a lot of money, right?’ he asked again.

She was shaking her head. ‘Not - I mean, _yes_ , it would, but you’re not thinking of selling it.’ She wasn’t saying it like it was a question. 

‘Sure I am,’ said Spike. ‘Why not? We could buy back all the _Bebop_ parts, couldn’t we, and get out of here, finally.’ 

She stiffened. ‘When you say we….’

‘You, me, Jet. Obviously. And I think Jet’s got it pretty stuck in his head about going to pick up Ed and that damn dog, don’t you?’ Faye bit her lip, and he went on, ‘I’ve been thinking, too, instead of going back after bounties for now... we could easily salvage junk to sell, or buy stuff up on the cheap. I know you could spot the good stuff miles off. We could mark the prices way up - and none of the overheads of this joint.’ 

She looked him up and down like she was assessing if he’d lost his mind. Spike wondered himself how he had ended up here again, asking a woman he loved to run away with him. After how well it turned out before. Except this time it didn’t feel as much like running away. 

‘Or we only buy and sell to middle-men. Or some other venture entirely. Either way’ - and he peered at the scrap of paper he’d just spotted tucked in the wiper - ‘I’m going to have to start with selling this thing, just to pay off this parking ticket. Damn, they move fast. I only left it a few seconds.’

‘I told you,’ Faye muttered, and leaned against the bonnet. ‘Look, I get if that’s what you and Jet want to do. I spoke to him. He obviously wants to leave here, like, yesterday.’

‘Good. I spoke to him too.’ 

‘It’s just that I’ve kind of got stuff going for me here, is all.’

‘Well, it’s your life. Plan is kind of reliant on having you as a business partner though.’

‘A little presumptuous of you to make this plan without me.’ 

‘Oh, c’mon comrade. I know you miss it out there. And the kid, no?’

She ignored that, and looked all around the car again. ‘Besides. You can’t. You can’t just _sell_ it.’ 

‘Why? You said it yourself. Things are just things.’

Across the street, a bus pulled away from its stop with a hiss, and Faye’s eyes flicked towards it. As if trying the question out for size, she said, ‘Spike.... it’s not really just a thing for you, is it?’ 

Spike paused. ‘It doesn’t always feel like that, no.’ He supposed he had known all along that the real reason she and Jet had gone to fetch the stupid thing was not to cover his tracks but to try and protect the one tangible piece of Julia that was left. They’d been so fucking relentless in their kindness to him. 

‘I know what it really means to you.’ 

‘Do you?’ said Spike quietly. ‘Then since you know me so well, why don’t you tell me what you mean to me?’ 

He was leaning towards her now, but Faye backed away from him, frowning. Another flash of _deja vu_.

‘What are you talking about? Why did you even come here, Spike? What I mean to you? How the hell would I know?’ She shook her head. ‘Didn’t I say you never tell me what’s going on? I never knew if I was supposed to be some kind of substitute version of Julia’- and Spike’s heart turned over - ‘or if you just wanted me so I could flirt with all your bounties - reel them in for you to take all the glory? Either way, I’m over being the stand-in for everyone’s fantasy woman. I’m a real person now, I want a real life. And you can’t just ask people to drop everything and follow you without giving them an answer!’

Spike’s heart continued to thud hard. ‘You were never either of those things, Faye,’ he said. Was that really what she thought? 

‘Then tell me what I am.’ She did nothing to disguise the shake in her voice, but lifted her head up in defiance.

Even now, he felt speaking the words would sever what was sacred between them. ‘I’m trying to tell you.’ 

‘How? You’re not saying anything.’

‘I have been.’ Faye opened her mouth in retort, but he kept talking. ‘Yeah, I will always miss Julia, that’s true. But she’s not here, she’s not anywhere. I can’t change that whether I keep this car or not. I have to focus on the things I can change, and being with you helps me remember how to do it. That I’m not betraying the past by wanting a future. So I guess that’s what you mean to me. A future.’

Faye closed her mouth, her face flushed pink.

‘I mean, I won’t stop you, if staying’s what you really want. I’m sure you could make a great life here. But the rest of your life can be anywhere. It doesn’t have to be like it was before. You wouldn’t be out there alone.’

At this, Faye put both hands over her face and for a long moment, he thought he’d said the wrong thing - had only ever said the wrong thing to her. He thought about how much had to have happened for him to even be talking with her just now. The fact of their ever having met being contingent on an accident over half a century ago, when she was literally frozen in time, until she would wake up in the same decade that they would both one day be in the same casino, looking at the same goddamn poker chip. How could you even begin to guess at the odds of that? Infinite poker chips, infinite universes in which they had never met. He had blown it in this one. It could never happen this way again.

But then she took her hands away, and took a deep breath.

‘I’m sorry I said that about Julia. It must really hurt that she’s gone.’

‘It’s okay. Yeah it does. At least I got to say goodbye though. I’m sorry too, about your family.’

‘Hey. I know. It’s ok.’ She stood up a little straighter. ‘It’s not your fault, you know. About Julia.’

Again, it was like she could see inside him. ‘I guess I do know that. But it might take me a long time to really know it,’ he said truthfully.

She nodded and that was all he needed to know she understood. Her eyes moved to his mouth, up to his eyes again.

‘Were you being real, about the future thing?’ she said quietly.

‘It’s real if you want it to be, Faye.’

For a second a very far away look came into her eyes. Then she recited a word to him that at first he did not understand until she said,

‘That’s my name.’

‘Oh.’

‘My actual name.’ 

‘Ok. Yeah.’ 

‘I’m going by that now. Just so you know.’

Spike nodded. ‘It suits you.’ He hesitated. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’ 

The way they smiled at each other then made him feel like they were teenagers. 

She added, ‘I’m not really ok, you know.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘No, me neither.’ But both of them were still smiling. 

‘So what, is that a yes?’ he asked, and she nudged at him softly.

‘I don’t know, _lunkhead_ ,’ she said, and her voice was soft too, and the sound of it was just right. ‘Why don’t you kiss me and find out?’ 

  
  


*****

What are days for?  
  
Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us 

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in: 

Where can we live but days?  
  
  


Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor 

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

 _  
\- Days ,_ Philip Larkin

*****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you read this whole thing, thank you so much! I mainly wrote this for myself but I hope that it can bring something to someone else, in some way, too. I know this series means a lot to many people. It does to me. 
> 
> Shout out also to Taylor Swift's Folklore for majorly inspiring me to write.
> 
> I'm galateas.tumblr.com if you feel like following me elsewhere!


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